I often like to quote Mark Twain "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.".
This is true for many areas of life, and just as true with IT and Altiris Endpoint Management.
So let me introduce the Pinger tool for Altiris CMDB. A tool to find out if inactive computers on the CMDB are really inactive or have an agent out of order or uninstalled.
The tool comes in the usual 3 versions: 7.1, 7.5 SP1 and 7.6. Here is the command line help message that provides an overview of the features and command line options:
Welcome to CWoC pinger Version 4.
This tool retrieves the inactive computers for 7 days from the Symantec CMDB
and checks for each computer whether it is accessible from the network via ICMP
echo request messages (ping).
If a computer is responding to ping, we use a Windows Service Control network
call to verify the state of the Altiris Agent service. If the service is found
in a Stopped state it is started, else it is left as-is.
Each test result (ping or service control) is logged into the database on the
'CWoC_pinger_event' table, as well as any exceptions (normally failures to
resolve a hostname, or to access the remote host service control manager).
Here are the currently supported command line arguments:
/pingonly
This command line prevent the tool from running the service control
check on inactive computers.
/days=<n>
Specify the number of inactive days threshold. By default the value used
is 7, but if you want to have more aggressive view of the estate you can
use a lower value, or if you want to restrain the result set you can
extend the value to 14, 21 or any number of days that suit your needs.
/test
Limit the count of computers to no more than 500.
/version
Display the version message.
/help || /?
Display this message.Please let us know if this utility is of use to you and if there are any features you would like to see implemented!